The Golla wallah

I was walking in Manek Chowk that morning when I saw the golla wallah. It brought back memories from childhood when one desired the golla (ice candy) more than anything else!

The Bazaar is so often a coming together of visual delight and affordable living, a place for the "common man”, a place where every character of R.K. Narayan’s stories would feel at home, a place where many of us would be happy wandering through as we find that which delights us and that which we can easily afford.

If you are thirsty as you meander through the bazaar, what are the choices you have? You can have ‘sada pani’ - just plain water. You can have tender coconut water or sugarcane juice. You can stop at a chai wallah or you can go to the golla wallah. When you think about it, it’s only the chai that you can also get at home, not the tender coconut, not the sugarcane juice, and surely not the golla! (Anjali's comment has proved me completely wrong. Do check out her home-made Kairi Panha slurp recipe!)

The golla is street food at its best. “This food is to die for” you hear Rocky and Mayur say on their television show ‘Highway on my Plate’ every time they are checking out a new eating place. It’s a programme I love watching because it takes you to all those places serving yummy food that you haven’t gotten to yet. There are endless episodes of it because there are endless choices of food in India. For those of us who love street food, there is the book Street food of India that won’t let us forget that street food is as much living heritage as anything else in this country. And, here is a recipe for the Kala Khatta golla…

I think now about all of the local thirst-quenchers and their place in the bazaar. How do they add functional value to the bazaar? How many sugarcane juice stalls might exist in the city compared to the golla wallah stalls? How many people make a livelihood in the city selling tender coconuts? How many invest in a business that sells the kala-khatta golla and more? And then, how does it differ from one city to another? In India, it is not so easy to know the details of operations within the informal sector – its past and its present.

However, we can put our recollections together and build an image of the bazaar. If I asked, what do you remember of the golla wallah? How often did you get to eat a golla? Was it something you did on the way back from school? Is it a memory linked with the summer holidays? If each of us shared what we can remember, we would soon have a bigger picture. So, if you would like to share your thoughts here, we can do a golla wallah collage of memories…

Read about:
The Pani Puri wallah
What is Chai
Tender Coconut in a Street Bazaar